I use Comcast's (formerly Time Warner RoadRunner) cable infrastructure but am an Earthlink client.
How exactly is Earthlink supposed to configure Comcast's routers to natively carry my IPV6 traffic? The answer is they can't because admin access is not shared and Comcast won't agree to it, at least according to Earthlink. So they offer tunneling if you want to load their WRT54G image on a suitable device. Or you can read their PDF describing their setup and figure out how to do it yourself with any reasonable Linux or UNIX distribution.
Nothing against Earthlink or Comcast but the average consumer is not going to understand my last paragraph, much less decide to load up IPV6. When you see the average firewall device at Fry's selling with native or tunneled IPV6 config panels, there might be some hope. Until then, it'll just be the lone trailblazers doing this out of intellectual curiosity.
Because the Tivo platform is according to most people much more reliable and featureful than the Scientific Atlantic / Motorola offerings from cable providers.
I would prefer to purchase something that does what I want than rent something doesn't.
Better still would be for CableLabs to loosen the restrictions on their CableCard devices such that so-inclined consumers or OEMS could build Linux or Microsoft Media Center devices. Nothing against TIVO, per se but those other platforms can offer even more features than Tivo.
Nielsen ratings depended on statistical sampling to measure what your "average" consumer was watching. The "market" needs to do what Nielsen did and pay consumers for information. Alexa, Doubleclick, Yahoo, Google and everyone else who seeks to track your browsing habits do it for one reason: information is marketable and it makes the consumer marketable.
The average slashdotter probably has the same bag of tricks to opt out of marketing: All phone numbers on the DNR, one or more DVRs, use of flashblock and adblock, regular cooking dumping, spam blocking/filtering on e-mail. Different classes of web sites have a different user id, password and e-mail address if those things are required.
And yet out there somewhere must be slashdotters willing to install a tool, utility, whatever to track their preferences for cold, hard cash. When marketers figure out a way to shell out micropayments for each datum discovered along with an enforceable opt-out and expiry system, let us know; some minority will install it. Until then we'll be the un/underrepresented technophiles.
Minidiscs were king in the field reporting / radio reporting / interview world for a long time.
Any recordable minidisc player was an excellent portable interview platform, and the autoindexing made playback a breeze.
These days I see interviewing bloggers using solid state devices such as the Roland Edirol R-4. And since the latest Edirols can be backed up to USB 2.0 flash devices in the field, you essentially have the unlimited media a minidics offers, albeit a little more slowly than a minidisc change.
Minidiscs are still indispensable for boots from the front-of-house (read: inside the area where the event is happening) sound board.
This is not a "race to the bottom" posting to brag about who is on the smallest / slowest machine.
I do all my day-to-day web surfing from an OpenBSD P IV 1.5 GHz box running the latest distro. Flash works fine, acrobat works fine and no worries about the bajillion signed-but-have-root active x controls, acrobat overflow conditions, gifs/jpgs/etc with spyware/backdoor payloads, etc. Really, there's no compelling reason to upgrade. But assuming I did the quantum leap in power to a recent intel or AMD proc would get me by for several more years. Recently I've been mulling the use of a Sun X2100 instead but mostly due to the fact I have one laying around more than anything.
Do I have a Windows game machine? Sure. My current Windows desktop is a P IV 3.06GHz Northwood machine, i.e. one of the few socket 478 processors to support hyperthreading. It runs XP very well and Vista passably, and is my HD timeshifting box with a HDHomeRun digital tuner attached. Despite the age of the box it plays whatever games I need it to well enough under XP and otherwise can drive a Viewsonic 32" flat-panel in native resolution with no stutter or pause.
Intel or AMD may eventually get my money for a new machine just because, but even then the not-at-all-sexy and clunky-by-today's-standards Northwood box will just be recycled as a MythTV machine easily extending its life for another year or two.
So although it's sexy and cool that Intel and AMD just keep coming out with faster and lower-power procs, there's nothing driving a switch. I wish there were because whatever that would be, it would probably be hella fun.
AT & T used to be the long distance provider on my Southwestern Bell Telephone service. They charged me some ridiculous fee every month just to carry me as a customer. And thanks to the federal taxes on that fee, and more fees either legitimately or otherwise passed on, the long distance portion of my phone bill was nearly $20 each month with zero minutes of usage. It took several months and eventually use of the words "slamming" and "cramming" to rid myself of their service despite many, many repeated requests.
Cingular used to be my cell-phone provider but I had no idea what a premium I was paying until I tried to switch my phones from one employee plan to another. Here's what they do: 1) They get your permission to remove your former employer's discount from your plan, 2) then they say "OK now just fax us this written document stating who you work for now, and we'll get right on that *two year* contract extension to give you your new discount." Classic bait and switch.
This forced me to start shopping around for a new provider. Wow Cingular thanks for totally shafting me! Cingular was charging me $79.95/mo for a "family" plan, but with a $9.95/mo fee to add my wife's phone to the plan (i.e. I was a family of one, LOL) They also charged an eye popping fee for blackberry data service. Switching saved me something like $50-$60/mo all told before any fees or taxes. I now pay less per month to T-mobile for two blackberries and more minutes. Well done Cingular; I'm so impressed with their customer service that anything you mail me is now dropped directly into my shredder.
Clearly they feel the same way as Cingular has never faxed me the unlock code for my Blackberry 7100 despite the fact that I have made multiple faxed / written requests for this and paid full retail for that phone qualifying for an immediate unlock.
I had someone UPS themselves a lovely new phone and arrange to pick it up at UPS by my "nephew" on a given day.
I called the police and said "There's an identity thief, picking up fraudulently ordered goods at this date and time with stolen ID at this location" and they said "not interested".
Mmmkay.
I waited for the guy myself but UPS blew it and told him they knew it was a stolen ID. Dammit.
In case you are wondering what I would have done if he showed, I would have done exactly my sister a police officer in the same state as me suggested. Asked him nicely to wait until the cops came, and tasered him until the cops showed up if he refused. According to her I was perfectly within my rights to detain him as he had my stolen property.
The standard def television looks better than regular standard def. More like 480p. The 'Hi def' channels look similar to 720p but with noticeable compression...
This is what kills me about all HDTV platforms available - satellite, cable and now apparently IPTV/fiber-near-the-premises
are compressing content.
I'm not one of those audiophile loonies who can "hear" oxidation in copper cables or any sort of video snob,
but for crying out loud macro-blocking and other compression artifacts are noticeable to anyone.
The first company to offer uncompressed content wins, in my humble opinion.
You have to rule your inbox w/an iron fist
on
Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
1 - My work e-mail has never been and will never be public. 2 - Any automated alert e-mails have to be justified, follow a formula for subject
(PROD/QA/SIT-ERROR/WARN/ALERT-ISSUE), and routed to the appropriate group.
(I don't want to know PROD is down if I'm on the SIT/QA/UAT rotation this month,
someone will escalate to me if I'm needed.) 3 - Ask to be removed from any superfluous distribution lists. Chatty Cathys
who email the world everytime they fart can go fark themselves. 4 - Use rules to autohighlight e-mails from people you need to react to immediately;
assume anything your customers, your boss or your team leads send you must be read now.
Yes I agree with this visionary. Why we could create a text-based interface, and let users experience the content first, perhaps gaining "levels" or "experience" (stay with me here, I know it's crazy) and when just for instance the users gain the topmost level they could extend the game for others. I'd call it the Multiple User Dimension. It would be awesome.
If you really want to go crazy, you could let people have a graphical interface and exchange in-game goods for user created content on standard templates. You know, shirts, pants, vehicles, that sort of thing. Heck that's such an innovative idea I think just everyone would join and so we should just call it "there". That's it "there", I mean there's only one because it would effectively be everyone's second life!
Nothing against Microsoft, per se, but half the security of my browsing experience is that my Firefox has no Flash, MS, Acrobat, or Active-X plugins. If I really want to see content because someone has a flash-only site or WMV content, it gets downloaded and/or viewed on a UNIX machine. From a user account. On a machine I can afford to reformat at any time.
Everyone has their hot buttons around this of course. For instance when I worked at NASA in the late 80's and early 90's, there were plenty of old-timers throughly cheesed that NASA was abandoning/had abandoned big-dumb-booster for the shuttle platform. They thought hey we have this awesome platform to stuff things into orbit cheaply and we can go from orbit anywhere once we are out of the gravity well!
But hey DOD and NASA wanted shuttle so they got shuttle. And don't even get me started on the number of iterations the space station went through thanks to congress' regular monkeying with the NASA budget. We must have burned miles of plotter paper on that alone. That's the problem with design-by-committee and funding by public consensus. You end up with a raft of compromises and no one is happy.
I don't want to come off as one of those old "get off my lawn" guys reminiscing about walking barefoot in the snow to school every day... BUT
When Laser Disc came out, it was definitely a video-phile's format in that publishers like criterion rushed to make the very best discs possible. They would remaster prints, add interview audio tracks with directors, create great liner notes, etc, etc. Discs were made for movie lovers by movie lovers.
DVDs saw the same sort of attention when it was first released, but in my opinion not to the same degree.
And now we have HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and what's available on this awesome new format? It's not Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, it's Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai. It's not The Lord of The Rings, it's Eragon.
I worked for an Amiga dealer in Houston, Texas before and after the Toaster was released.
Not only was the Toaster broadcast quality (as K8Fan said by the only standard that mattered: was it broadcast?) but so were several other products using the same stick.
In fact, our largest customers for Amiga video editing setups were Mexican television stations.
Every weekend at least one maybe two Hispanic gentlemen would roll in with a large wad of cash and buy a complete setup of some kind or another.
Maybe an A1000 or A500 on the low-end with a cheaper genlocker and a few fonts or a full blown Toaster setup if they enough money.
This is exactly the technology push they need to squelch all the "SUN's CPUs stink" crowd. (Assuming they can make it work, of course.)
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts it never runs Linux, either.
You'll only see two people with this tech: SUN and IBM.
SUN because they invented it and IBM because they'll patent every variation they can think of on this idea by next Tuesday, thus forcing SUN into a cross-licensing deal.
They still use a joystick to direct the airplane, they just don't use a yoke.
It's not like they are just typing on a keyboard.
Even so, Airbuses have had more than one incident because of their FBW system. Most notably a fatal crash in India, and an incident in Germany where pilots overrode the autopilot and ended up landing in the wrong city!
Check out the Risks digest for plenty of information on Airbuses in specific and the Risks of automation in general.
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks
(These aren't luddites, exactly the opposite, these are the people who try to learn from mistakes and improve upon systems design).
Slashdot Mirror
I use Comcast's (formerly Time Warner RoadRunner) cable infrastructure
but am an Earthlink client.
How exactly is Earthlink supposed to configure Comcast's routers
to natively carry my IPV6 traffic? The answer is they can't because admin access
is not shared and Comcast won't agree to it, at least according to Earthlink.
So they offer tunneling if you want to load their WRT54G image on a suitable device.
Or you can read their PDF describing their setup and figure out how to do it yourself
with any reasonable Linux or UNIX distribution.
Nothing against Earthlink or Comcast but the average consumer is not going to
understand my last paragraph, much less decide to load up IPV6. When you see
the average firewall device at Fry's selling with native or tunneled IPV6
config panels, there might be some hope. Until then, it'll just be the lone trailblazers
doing this out of intellectual curiosity.
Correction: that should real SMALL OEMS... i.e. local mom and pop integrators, not just Dell, Alienware, etc.
Because the Tivo platform is according to most people much more reliable and featureful
than the Scientific Atlantic / Motorola offerings from cable providers.
I would prefer to purchase something that does what I want than rent something doesn't.
Better still would be for CableLabs to loosen the restrictions on their CableCard devices
such that so-inclined consumers or OEMS could build Linux or Microsoft Media Center devices.
Nothing against TIVO, per se but those other platforms can offer even more features than Tivo.
Nielsen ratings depended on statistical sampling to measure what your "average"
consumer was watching. The "market" needs to do what Nielsen did and pay consumers
for information. Alexa, Doubleclick, Yahoo, Google and everyone else who seeks to
track your browsing habits do it for one reason: information is marketable and it makes
the consumer marketable.
The average slashdotter probably has the same bag of tricks to opt out of marketing:
All phone numbers on the DNR, one or more DVRs, use of flashblock and adblock, regular
cooking dumping, spam blocking/filtering on e-mail. Different classes of web sites have a
different user id, password and e-mail address if those things are required.
And yet out there somewhere must be slashdotters willing to install a tool, utility, whatever
to track their preferences for cold, hard cash. When marketers figure out a way to shell out
micropayments for each datum discovered along with an enforceable opt-out and expiry system,
let us know; some minority will install it. Until then we'll be the un/underrepresented technophiles.
There are worse fates.
Minidiscs were king in the field reporting / radio reporting / interview world for a long time.
Any recordable minidisc player was an excellent portable interview platform, and the autoindexing
made playback a breeze.
These days I see interviewing bloggers using solid state devices such as the Roland Edirol R-4.
And since the latest Edirols can be backed up to USB 2.0 flash devices in the field,
you essentially have the unlimited media a minidics offers, albeit a little more slowly
than a minidisc change.
Minidiscs are still indispensable for boots from the front-of-house (read: inside the area
where the event is happening) sound board.
This is not a "race to the bottom" posting to brag about who is on the smallest / slowest machine.
I do all my day-to-day web surfing from an OpenBSD P IV 1.5 GHz box running the latest distro.
Flash works fine, acrobat works fine and no worries about the bajillion signed-but-have-root active x controls,
acrobat overflow conditions, gifs/jpgs/etc with spyware/backdoor payloads, etc. Really, there's
no compelling reason to upgrade. But assuming I did the quantum leap in power to a recent intel or AMD
proc would get me by for several more years. Recently I've been mulling the use of a Sun X2100
instead but mostly due to the fact I have one laying around more than anything.
Do I have a Windows game machine? Sure. My current Windows desktop is a P IV 3.06GHz Northwood machine,
i.e. one of the few socket 478 processors to support hyperthreading. It runs XP very well and Vista passably,
and is my HD timeshifting box with a HDHomeRun digital tuner attached. Despite the age of the box
it plays whatever games I need it to well enough under XP and otherwise can drive a Viewsonic 32"
flat-panel in native resolution with no stutter or pause.
Intel or AMD may eventually get my money for a new machine just because, but even then the not-at-all-sexy
and clunky-by-today's-standards Northwood box will just be recycled as a MythTV machine easily extending its life
for another year or two.
So although it's sexy and cool that Intel and AMD just keep coming out with faster and lower-power procs,
there's nothing driving a switch. I wish there were because whatever that would be, it would probably be hella fun.
AT & T used to be the long distance provider on my Southwestern Bell Telephone service.
They charged me some ridiculous fee every month just to carry me as a customer. And thanks
to the federal taxes on that fee, and more fees either legitimately or otherwise passed on, the
long distance portion of my phone bill was nearly $20 each month with zero minutes of usage.
It took several months and eventually use of the words "slamming" and "cramming" to rid myself
of their service despite many, many repeated requests.
Cingular used to be my cell-phone provider but I had no idea what a premium I was paying
until I tried to switch my phones from one employee plan to another. Here's what they do:
1) They get your permission to remove your former employer's discount from your plan, 2) then they
say "OK now just fax us this written document stating who you work for now, and we'll get right
on that *two year* contract extension to give you your new discount." Classic bait and switch.
This forced me to start shopping around for a new provider. Wow Cingular thanks for totally shafting me!
Cingular was charging me $79.95/mo for a "family" plan, but with a $9.95/mo fee to add
my wife's phone to the plan (i.e. I was a family of one, LOL) They also charged an eye popping fee
for blackberry data service. Switching saved me something like $50-$60/mo all told before any fees or taxes.
I now pay less per month to T-mobile for two blackberries and more minutes. Well done Cingular; I'm so
impressed with their customer service that anything you mail me is now dropped directly into my shredder.
Clearly they feel the same way as Cingular has never faxed me the unlock code for my Blackberry 7100 despite
the fact that I have made multiple faxed / written requests for this and paid full retail for that phone
qualifying for an immediate unlock.
I had someone UPS themselves a lovely new phone and arrange to pick it up at UPS by my "nephew" on a given day.
I called the police and said "There's an identity thief, picking up fraudulently ordered goods at this date
and time with stolen ID at this location" and they said "not interested".
Mmmkay.
I waited for the guy myself but UPS blew it and told him they knew it was a stolen ID. Dammit.
In case you are wondering what I would have done if he showed, I would have done exactly my
sister a police officer in the same state as me suggested. Asked him nicely to wait until the
cops came, and tasered him until the cops showed up if he refused. According to her I was
perfectly within my rights to detain him as he had my stolen property.
Er,
A TERRAflop would have something to do with Earth, I suppose?
A teraflop on the other hand would be ten to the power of 12 (10^12) flops.
This is what kills me about all HDTV platforms available - satellite, cable and now apparently IPTV/fiber-near-the-premises are compressing content. I'm not one of those audiophile loonies who can "hear" oxidation in copper cables or any sort of video snob, but for crying out loud macro-blocking and other compression artifacts are noticeable to anyone. The first company to offer uncompressed content wins, in my humble opinion.
Yes I agree with this visionary. Why we could create a text-based interface, and let users
experience the content first, perhaps gaining "levels" or "experience" (stay with me
here, I know it's crazy) and when just for instance the users gain the topmost
level they could extend the game for others. I'd call it the Multiple User Dimension.
It would be awesome.
If you really want to go crazy, you could let people have a graphical interface and exchange
in-game goods for user created content on standard templates. You know, shirts, pants, vehicles,
that sort of thing. Heck that's such an innovative idea I think just everyone would join and
so we should just call it "there". That's it "there", I mean there's only one because it
would effectively be everyone's second life!
Wow that guy's crystal ball is working overtime.
There's a technote on using the 5250 w/RSA http://www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/appnote_numb
http://www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2.cfm/qv_pk/393
My UNIX machine is OpenBSD. Does that tell you anything?
Nothing against Microsoft, per se, but half the security of my browsing experience
is that my Firefox has no Flash, MS, Acrobat, or Active-X plugins. If I really
want to see content because someone has a flash-only site or WMV content, it gets
downloaded and/or viewed on a UNIX machine. From a user account. On a machine I can afford
to reformat at any time.
WMV plugin? Why would I load that?
Everyone has their hot buttons around this of course. For instance when I worked at NASA
in the late 80's and early 90's, there were plenty of old-timers throughly cheesed
that NASA was abandoning/had abandoned big-dumb-booster for the shuttle platform. They thought
hey we have this awesome platform to stuff things into orbit cheaply and we can go from orbit
anywhere once we are out of the gravity well!
But hey DOD and NASA wanted shuttle so they got shuttle. And don't even get me started on
the number of iterations the space station went through thanks to congress' regular monkeying
with the NASA budget. We must have burned miles of plotter paper on that alone. That's the problem
with design-by-committee and funding by public consensus. You end up with a raft of compromises and
no one is happy.
I don't want to come off as one of those old "get off my lawn" guys reminiscing
about walking barefoot in the snow to school every day... BUT
When Laser Disc came out, it was definitely a video-phile's format in that publishers
like criterion rushed to make the very best discs possible. They would remaster prints,
add interview audio tracks with directors, create great liner notes, etc, etc.
Discs were made for movie lovers by movie lovers.
DVDs saw the same sort of attention when it was first released, but in my opinion not
to the same degree.
And now we have HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and what's available on this awesome new format?
It's not Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, it's Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai. It's not
The Lord of The Rings, it's Eragon.
Meh.
This is why I'm not a CEO; I would have hired actors to dress up as
Err and Ignignot flip off Boston for the next few weeks.
At the risk of swerving off-topic from discussions about fertile flood plains and partisian politics:
Technology for All is installing a 40 computer 'Computer Technology Center' (CTC) in the Astrodome for Hurricane Katrina victims.
If you'd like to read their blog discussing their efforts, show up and volunteer: http://texasctcs.blogspot.com/
If you just want to donate hardware or money:
http://www.techforall.org/
Back to your regularly scheduled squabbling... carry on.
I worked for an Amiga dealer in Houston, Texas before and after the Toaster was released.
Not only was the Toaster broadcast quality (as K8Fan said by the only standard that
mattered: was it broadcast?) but so were several other products using the same stick.
In fact, our largest customers for Amiga video editing setups were Mexican television stations.
Every weekend at least one maybe two Hispanic gentlemen would roll in with a large wad of cash
and buy a complete setup of some kind or another.
Maybe an A1000 or A500 on the low-end with a cheaper genlocker and a few fonts or a full blown
Toaster setup if they enough money.
He lost all credibility with me when he said
Nokia's ISPO box runs a Linux derivative.
I guess when you are that clueless BSD looks like Linux. Bzzt! Next!
ScrewMaster --
Your unpatched box, no matter how much "value" it might add by doing whatever it is
doing is a cancer on your customers' networks.
Eventually, they will choose to unplug your box and find another vendor who has a clue about
security when it has infected their network
enough times.
Au contraire --
This is exactly the technology push they need to squelch all the
"SUN's CPUs stink" crowd.
(Assuming they can make it work, of course.)
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts it never runs Linux, either.
You'll only see two people with this tech: SUN and IBM.
SUN because they invented it and IBM because they'll patent every variation they can think
of on this idea by next Tuesday,
thus forcing SUN into a cross-licensing deal.
Sorry, your information is a little out of date.
1) Generators run their units with minimal loads
to keep in sync, so that when it's
time to ramp up, sync is not an issue.
2) The grid doesn't have to be brought up with
all generators and exchanges linked, they
can be brought up as islands and rejoined later.
First -- you are wrong about pilot inputs --
They still use a joystick to direct the airplane, they just don't use a yoke.
It's not like they are just typing on a keyboard.
Even so, Airbuses have had more than one incident because of their FBW system. Most notably a fatal crash in India, and an
incident in Germany where pilots overrode
the autopilot and ended up landing in the wrong city!
Check out the Risks digest for plenty of information on Airbuses in specific and
the Risks of automation in general.
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks
(These aren't luddites, exactly the opposite, these are the people who try to learn from mistakes and improve upon systems design).